Within the IETF there’s been a bit of discussion in the past months
about voice spam/SPIT and just recently RFC 5039 from Jonathan
Rosenberg and Cullen Jennings was published that specifically
addresses the issue of SIP and Spam.
The RFC is an excellent summary of the current thinking about the
SPIT problem and potential solutions to address it. If you haven’t
read the document, I would *highly* recommend it.
A concern I had, though, was that it did not appear to me that
existing documents address the issue of what SPIT could look like at
a network level. For instance, if a network administrator monitoring
network traffic suddenly saw a large flood of SIP INVITE packets
coming into his/her network, it could be:
1. a telemarketer/spammer launching a flood of SIP connections to
deliver SPIT;
2. an attacker launching a DoS attack through one of the various SIP
attack tools out there; or
3. a legitimate notification system starting to notify a range of SIP
endpoints.
I could very easily see existing network tools that look at traffic
and perform anomaly detection (and potentially source suppression)
being modified to suppress large flows of SIP traffic. This last case
of legitimate traffic concerned me and so I put together an Internet-
Draft talking about the types of legitimate systems that might
generate a significant volume of traffic that could resemble SPIT (or
a DoS attack).
I put the document out primarily to stimulate discussion. Are these
legitimate scenarios being addressed in current thinking about
SPIT? If not, my point really is that they need to be considered.
Comments about the document are very definitely welcome. Are there other scenarios I
should include? Am I accurate? Am I overstating the case? or what?
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